The Victory Album: Reflections on the Good Life after the Good War

Arts.

Introduction

After the Good War

On May 8, 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, having accepted the surrender of Nazi Germany, made the following announcement: The mission of this allied force was fulfilled at 0300, local time, May 7th, 1945.¹

On August 15 of that year Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander of the Allied forces in the Pacific theater, having confirmed the surrender of Imperial Japan, sent the following message to all units: Orders have been issued to the Pacific Fleet and to other forces under the command of the Commander in Chief US Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean areas to cease offensive operations against the Japanese. With such terse, unadorned, workmanlike communications, American commanders told the world that the great task had been accomplished. The Axis threat had been ended, and final victory had been achieved. Now it was time to go on with the future.

V Was for Victory. This was the title John Morton Blum chose for his classic study of the World War II American home front. The past tense is telling. One feels the sense of completion and closure. For Americans on all fronts it was time for life to go forward; and go forward it would, as Lewis Lapham has written, into new dimensions of national possibility undreamed even by the most visionary of the founders: In 1945, the United States inherited the earth, wrote Lapham; and what was left of Western civilization passed into the American account. Further, the war had also prompted the country to invent a miraculous economic machine that seemed to grant as many wishes as were asked of it. The continental United States had escaped the plague of war, and so it was easy enough for the heirs to believe that they had been anointed by God.²

In one form or another, such were the basic majority of attitudes for Americans of the postwar era where the new visions of promise attending the great triumph became portals to an ever-extending future, a golden age of American peace and plenitude that to a great degree has never ended. To be sure, for large numbers of post-1945 Americans the idea of the Good Life after the Good War remains decidedly problematic; most notably for blacks and women, it was hardly a uniform or even a majority experience, then or now. Nor, it might be added, even on the part of white males of the victory generation, can one avoid at significant moments a sense of the almost unbearable sadness of postwar American life in general as represented, for instance, in domestic novels by returned veterans such as James Jones's Some Came Running, Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, or Joseph Heller's Something Happened. Still, the concept continues to shape both personal memory and cultural reflection. To put it simply, many Americans who, like me, came of age during the second half of the twentieth century will always find it difficult to think of themselves as anything but inheritors and beneficiaries of the post-World War II culture of victory. For us the facts will remain that, in outlook, education, and security, in moral energy and social and political opportunity, a lot of us had a head start on the rest of the world. To cite the reflections of a friend and contemporary I read recently, we all felt somehow as if we had been part of a great triumph. Accordingly, the world of our formative experiences seemed imbued with a pervasive sense of calm, confidence, and relief.³ He gets it just right, I think. The world had been saved somehow. The future was ours to build. And we all knew who had laid the foundations for us. It was our parents and aunts and uncles—our postal carriers and electricians and teachers and bookkeepers—the people who had fought and won the Good War and in the process had earned for themselves the title of the Greatest Generation.

Along with them, in spirit and energy, we felt the glow of victory in World War II as a kind of beacon, the light of a moment in which Americans' attitudes toward themselves and the world seem to have been endowed with a certain clarity and generosity of purpose. At home we all felt ourselves to have been given a gift of peace, prosperity, and security, a style of living and a quality of life unprecedented in human history. Abroad, in the annals of power, no other combatant nation had ever emerged from a major war with potentialities so great for a larger, global good. If we were advantaged by the affluence and power accrued in our great victory, we were also obligated by them. We felt in them a new purpose and a new duty to make our world, if not perfect, at least better and, further, to make it better not just for ourselves but for everyone.

Moreover—with frequent reminders at mealtimes, on shopping trips, and nearly anytime else a lesson in uprightness seemed in order from our parents or other elder relations—we were schooled to see ourselves as working with a compounded inheritance of strength, forbearance, sacrifice, and self-discipline from the years before the war. That is to say, as is frequently overlooked by Americans growing up after midcentury, the people we thought of as the adult generation of World War II remembered themselves equally as the youth generation of the Great Depression. And they never let us forget that either. In their own understandings of post-1945 America, to borrow the phrasings of Studs Terkel, the great chronicler of both epochal passages in the national experience, the vision of the Good War could never be separated from the memory of Hard Times. Before the trials of Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Anzio, and the Battle of the Bulge, before meat and gas rationing and the dreadful anticipations and arrivals of War Department telegrams about loved ones killed and wounded, there had been bank failures, crop disasters, plant closings, enormous migrations of the displaced and unemployed; losses and foreclosures of farms, businesses, family dwellings; breadlines, bonus marches, labor riots, political arrests, and lynchings. The other side of making do had in fact been doing without. The war had surely been a case of do or die. But no one had ever forgotten the other, earlier decade of fear, the classic Roosevelt formulation notwithstanding, that really had been something close to fear itself.

Now they desperately wanted to put all of it in the past, the years of shortage and want, threat and menace; and, if not vouchsafed the endless future envisioned by their children's generation at least granted the just satisfactions of getting on with a long-deferred present. The larger postwar world menaced and haunted. In their eyes the vast human suffering amid the ruined cities and blighted landscapes of Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific (former allies and former enemies alike), hunger, unemployment, poverty, domestic suffering, and disease, they saw specters of new disorders and hardships out of which they had somehow, barely, if miraculously, been lifted by the war. Even by the most optimistic assessment, the books and movies of the war counted what had been lost as much as all that had been won. Coming out of the shadow of censorship, cutting through euphemism and popular sentimentalism, novels especially were quite grim. The specter of totalitarianism dominates From Here to Eternity, The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions, The Caine Mutiny. Hard-boiled writing and bleak existential allegory fed into Hollywood film noir and political scare-fables of the McCarthy era. In politics, beyond the Marshall Plan for helping war-torn Europe rise from the rubble and the MacArthur shogunate bringing democracy to Japan, it was hard to see what Americans and the world might assess as having been truly gained in 1945, with quondam allies now the new enemies. The Soviets, after a wartime embrace as a necessary antifascist partner, resumed status as a regime every bit as monolithic, repressive, and murderous as any in history, launching new aggressive plans for totalitarian world domination. China—throughout the war a weak, corrupt, foundationless, pseudodemocracy—once the Japanese had been expelled, came down like a house of cards, with the Nationalist regime supplanted by a new, aggressive, Asian Communist monolith. Western allies such as Britain and France dealt with political and civilian economies teetering on the brink of collapse, meanwhile shoring up the remnants of prewar empire. Central European states fell one by one under Soviet-dominated dictatorships. Fragile coalition governments in France, Italy, Greece, and Turkey, attempting to reassume status as operating democracies, stood always on the edge of dissolving into anarchy or of succumbing to socialist or communist governments.

At home, Red Scare America fearfully scoured the nooks and crannies of national life for the enemy within. Conspiracy theories abounded about who ought to be watching whom. Big Brother had to be somebody, somewhere, as posited by George Orwell's classic novel 1984, the title of which everyone knew to be a simple inversion of 1948. Not that there wasn't plenty to worry about. In 1948 the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers case shared headlines with the fall of Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Airlift. In 1949 Poland and China went communist, and the Soviets exploded their own atomic bomb.

In the latter development came to be concentrated the postwar fear presiding over everything else, the worst specter of all: that of nuclear annihilation. Here the great achievements of victory culture were compounded into the most dreadful of all ironies. Ironically, the greatest of all the war's American production miracles had been the atomic bomb. Ironically, the Americans, at the forefront of the crusade for freedom, peace, and justice against murderous, utterly inhumane military totalitarianisms, had used the bomb on enemy civilian targets—not once but twice. Ironically, now, suddenly, it was equally plausible that the astonishing peace and prosperity of postwar American life could end tomorrow in the cauldron of fire rising under a host of similar monstrous mushroom clouds.

A great popular icon of hope for new geopolitical comity in the postwar era was the United Nations. Installed in its fancy, futuristic, glass-walled headquarters along the East River in New York, it got a lot of terrific publicity with its various global relief activities and its general assembly sessions generating reams of documents on human rights and new frameworks for international understanding and cooperation. With its sky-blue flag and trademark logo over the speakers' podium and visits by foreign plenipotentiaries in national costume, it may have been a great place for school trips, where kids in headphones could sit and be part of the miracle of simultaneous translation, but its work was largely a toothless internationalism, rendered ineffectual by the quarreling and obstructionism of major-power members of the Security Council. The only reason a U.N. force could be committed to the defense of South Korea after the 1950 Communist invasion from the North lay in the brief absence of the Soviet Union from that body, which it had decided temporarily to boycott.

The actual situation in geopolitics could be more accurately measured in the rise of the post-World War II Third World—the developing nations. In Africa, South America, the Middle East, South Asia, and around the Pacific Rim insurgencies destabilized fragile new postcolonial and nationalist coalition regimes. The global roster of Communist-bloc states threatened increase at every turn. Against this, according to American policies of containment, Free World governments became increasingly identified as a dismal panoply of tin-pot dictatorships and authoritarian hellholes. Cast up as mirroring Tito's Yugoslavia, Gomulka's Poland, and Gottwald's Czechoslovakia were Chiang Kai-shek's Formosa, Syngman Rhee's South Korea, Ngo Dinh Diem's Vietnam, Alberto Salazar's Portugal, Francisco Franco's Spain, King Farouk's Egypt, Reza Pahlevi's Iran, Juan Batista's Cuba, and Anastasio Somoza's Nicaragua. In the new world order of nonstop geopolitical crisis, the only things getting better for anybody, anywhere, seemed to be improved nuclear weapons and more effective delivery systems.

Meanwhile, equally dispiriting for those willing to look them in the eye were the hard facts of American domestic politics, down with the oily gears and the working parts. David Halberstam was right. They were mean times: full of haters, dirt collectors, list makers, self-aggrandizing demagogues, creeps, and liars; of witch hunts, loyalty oaths, blacklists, race murders, spy executions, illegal surveillance, and censorship in the popular information and entertainment media.

One understands the built-in irony of entitling in countless retrospective studies. Emblazoned on the title pages one finds such grand phrasings as American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945–1960 or A Dream of Greatness: The American People, 1945–1963. Underneath, one prepares to read of stifling conformity; smug materialism; stubborn anti-intellectualism; and bland, middle-of-the-road tastes in music, movies, television, and literature. Formula phrases about the times elicit a similarly axiomatic response: the Good Years, the Baby Boom, the Eisenhower era, the Fabulous Fifties, Happy Days. The idea of mainstream America over these years has come to be deeply discredited: a nation out there in the heartland reading Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, subscribing to Reader's Digest, watching Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, and laughing at I Love Lucy on the boob tube. This also is the middle America retrospectively caricatured through the domestic upheavals of the 1960s, Vietnam, civil rights, the counterculture, and the endless succession of profound disappointments and disillusionments to follow—the manipulations of the Nixon-Agnew era, with its great silent majority opposed to nattering nabobs of negativism. Against this it is hard to maintain that there was once a real place called post-1945 middle America and that, if it was not a good place, it tried to be, or it promised to try hard to be.

The argument allows no place for revisionary nostalgia or nostalgists—devotees of commemorative volumes, golden oldies record collections, restored classic cars, ducktail haircuts, poodle skirts, sock hops, TV dinners, drive-in theaters. Most of these remain relics of a world that largely didn't exist in the experiences of everyday Americans, save in ads or TV shows and movies; or if it did, it certainly did not shower its promised blessings on large numbers of actual people beyond the white middle class. Even in popular social commentary the idea of American promise being written about was frequently that of promise betrayed. The most respected cultural critique of the age was that of a theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, entitled The Irony of American History. Other titles went more directly to the point: Richard Hofstadter's Anti-intellectualism in American Life or William J. Lederer's A Nation of Sheep. Before the 1960s discovered them as popular purveyors of Freud and Marx, Norman O. Brown in Life against Death and Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man had laid down the terms of essential critique. The happy consciousness, Marcuse called it. The spirit of the times had become encapsulated in the insulating, narcotizing, self-hypnotizing belief that society delivers the goods.

Abroad, the attitudes of other nationalities could be summarized as envy mixed with substantial fear and loathing. The only country in history to have used atomic weaponry on its enemies in a war now seemed to have set itself up as the world policeman, the self-appointed benevolent cop on the block. Old allies marched to the American beat. No matter what the cultural origins of any new aspirant state, American friendship and assistance required cultural reshaping in the type and image of the American way. America became the arbiter of acceptable structures of moral, social, economic, and political relationship, spouting democratic platitudes and professing democratic goodwill to former colonial peoples of developing nations, frequently non-Western and nonwhite, while practicing total racial segregation in every sphere from the bathroom to the ballot box and enforcing world peace abroad with the H-bomb, the B-52, and eventually the ICBM.

At the same time, one must not play false with the nostalgia of counter-cultural critique. The facts cannot be controverted that, for certain categories of Americans, the good life after the good war may have remained the not-so-good life. Where happiness prevailed, there was also plenty about it that remained dour, bland, insular, conformist, pedestrian, and joyless. The happy consciousness, such as it may have existed, was frequently restricted to a world of small pleasures. For young people this included learning and doing things in school (science, literature, mathematics, foreign language, and extracurriculars: sports, music, art, field trips). For their parents it included the daily regularities of work; a steady job; participation in school, church, service organizations, or other forms of community involvement; reading the hometown newspaper; an evening of TV; Sunday dinner and a nap. At the same time, one experienced a rich sense of earned satisfaction, a genuine and palpably experienced enjoyment of common life. People built houses, bought cars, went to movies, watched TV, played records, hummed advertising jingles for the simple pleasure of being part of the world they had made for themselves and their children. An immense avidity for things conjoined with a larger spirit of cultural curiosity and appetite for knowledge. It was the heyday of the great, mass-circulation magazines—of tables overflowing with Time, Life, Look,, Newsweek, Collier's, the Saturday Evening Post, Popular Mechanics, Sports Illustrated, Field and Stream, Boy's Life, McCall's, Better Homes and Gardens, Redbook, Ladies' Home Journal, Reader's Digest (the latter likely on the toilet tank, maybe with Guideposts). There was also a tremendous book culture, abetted by flourishing subscription programs such as the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Literary Guild, and Readers' Digest Condensed Books. Here, and elsewhere, as is too often forgotten, the general abundance of things frequently expressed itself in astonishing variety. The idea of the planned community now suggests in retrospect the faceless, dispiriting, anonymous, homogenous, suburban housing development. But little houses made of ticky-tacky were simply and flatly not the rule for anyone growing up in any American town or small city. Rather, one recalls the plenitude of architectures—Cape Cod, Tudor, ranch, colonial, fieldstone, stucco, wood, brick; houses with front doors, back doors, front lawns, side lawns, backyards, sheds, shops, garages, porches, breezeways, balconies, attics, basements; good houses, built strongly and sturdily by people who knew their tools and equipment and thought well of their trades and vocations—carpenters, plumbers, masons, electricians; houses full of well-made mechanical equipment and appliances, from power drills and washing machines to vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers, regularly maintained and serviced. Much will be said here about TV, movies, music, magazines, advertising, cars, housings, clothing, fads, hobbies, and sports; about dumb pleasures like Friday night fights, Little League baseball, picture windows, frozen-custard stands, and swimming pools. But for anyone who was alive at the time, it is also still hard to gainsay the sheer, unselfconscious, tasteless exuberance of it all sometimes—and in images of anything but a desperate, barren, humdrum gaiety: the Big Bopper singing Chantilly Lace, Domenico Modugno doing Volare, or, before anybody ever heard the word remix, a stupid novelty record like Flying Saucers borrowing snippets from Fats Domino, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and the Platters; Bill Veeck sending a dwarf to the plate in a Chicago White Sox game to draw a walk; Ernie Kovacs putting new meaning into the word bop with the cool sounds of the Nairobi Trio. People may have learned to eat ethnic or foreign food through grotesque mass-production mockeries—pizza from a Chef Boyardee box and Chinese from cans of La Choy or Chung King. In most cities at least they could wash it down with five or ten good local brands of beer. And say what one might about cars, there will never be another Nash Metropolitan or Packard Clipper, a Chrysler Town and Country Sedan or Lincoln Continental Mark II. On TV there would never be anything again like the shameless, mad effrontery of Uncle Miltie, Your Show of Shows, The Honeymooners, until maybe Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, or South Park. In the era of Harry Potter, TheLord of the Rings, and Spiderman (I, II, and III) nothing is so outrageously over the top as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Adventures of Davy Crockett, or Demetrius and the Gladiators.

In politics, Republican or Democrat, young or old, blue-collar or white, heartland patriot or urban sophisticate, most people really did like Ike—and I emphasize the word like. Not love, but like: like, that is, as a word never conjoined with a possible opposite such as hate or even dislike, which in the case of Eisenhower was largely inconceivable. I say that with the authority of a teenage kid who grew up sitting a few rows back from him on Sunday mornings at the Gettysburg Presbyterian Church and on one memorable weekday afternoon shagged golf balls for him at the local country club; but I also say that as an American who can now truly remember him as the last American president no one ever hated.

Whatever world all that was, it is now somewhere behind us, somewhere between comic books and computer-generated screen heroics. In 1925 it was Jay Gatsby's dream, a green and golden dream of wonder lost somewhere back where the dark fields of the Republic rolled on under the night. In 1950 the more apt analogue would be the world of the black-and-white TV Superman—Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Perry White, Jimmy Olson, Kryptonite, Metropolis, the Daily Planet—as an abstract or epitome of the times. If there was such a thing as an American superhero, in the age of Jim Anderson or Ward Cleaver, he would of course be in real life a bumbling, funny guy with glasses, knocking things off the boss's desk and never quite being able to say the right things to the swell girl he is secretly in love with. In the age of Dwight Eisenhower he would, of course, have spent a normal, unprepossessing, small-town boyhood steeped in the values of the heartland American family. As a new American urbanite, if he needed to put on his Superman suit, he would, of course, be able to change clothes in the nearest phone booth. Such happy TV credulity about this Strange Visitor from Another Planet, faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, really could couple with an honest belief in the worthiness of a never-ending struggle for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. For a nation attempting to conjoin unprecedented, almost science-fictional, superpower status with the espoused values of a basic working democracy, the ideal was, in a word, citizenship. It was once the kind of thing they taught in junior high school and gave merit badges for in the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, but it also meant something truly worthy and profound: the exercise of opportunity and obligation in a civil society and the attempt, where possible, to extend such right of exercise to other inhabitants of the globe. To be sure, other usages of the era both marked and mocked its anxieties and evasions. Civil defense was a reminder of unresolved geopolitical confrontation and omnipresent nuclear terror; civil rights taunted members of the body politic as the grossly unmet goal of racial liberty and comity. That both phrases now sound strangely archaic is a direct result of the energy, optimism, hopefulness, and, yes, magnanimity that helped Americans of the era aspire to making better the worst of times for someone, somewhere in the world, both at home and abroad.

Nearly everyone now dates the world after 1945 as the age of Pax Americana. After the great twentieth-century wars abroad, World War I, World War II, the cold war, the wars of national liberation, the current war on terror; and after the upheavals of the Kennedy and King assassinations, the tumults of the Vietnam War and the 1960s' counterculture, Watergate, the ensuing cycles of endless political scandals and economic bubbles and meltdowns at home; if anything, America is even richer, more militarily dominant, than ever before. In inexplicable proportion, for someone particularly of the post-1945 era now beginning to get old, one feels a distinct, overt, aggressive new meanness afoot in the land. Consumerism has evolved into a manic, trend-spotting acquisitiveness. Current-events curiosity has become a lust for celebrity scandal and media overload. A shared sense of religious, social, economic, geopolitical conviction, translating itself into a commitment—however misguided at times—to the global sharing of the values of a free society, has been reduced to a nasty insularity and self-righteous certitude. A cultural acceptance of massive economic inequities has been matched with a willed scientific ignorance and environmental shortsightedness. People will eventually get cloned; while they are waiting for that to happen, they can now choose a computer avatar.

A single material-production analogy from the recent histories of American wars may suffice for the moment. From the perspective of the post-1945 American generation who still remember images from both the assembly line and the battlefront, the machine that won World War II will be most likely identified as the Jeep—light, cheap, nimble, simple to build, easy to fix. The vehicle currently prowling the streets of Baghdad, Mosul, Fallujah, and all the other places where Americans and Iraqis are likely to get blown up this week is the Humvee—heavy, expensive, lumbering, prodigiously complicated to operate and maintain; or, in its domestic incarnation, the Hummer, the ultimate icon of hulking, metallic, gas-guzzling excess, America's way of expressing to the world its flamboyant recalcitrance and defiant unconcern for the human problems of lesser mortals elsewhere. Pride in the American Way of Life, indeed, here and elsewhere is measured for many of us by how far we seem to have traveled away from an older, but still-remembered, national capacity for goodwill and basic generosity of spirit. A lot of bad wars and sad lives later, it still may be the gift of memory that we can give.

¹ Albert D. Chandler, ed., The Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower (Baltimore: 1970), vol. 4, 2696.

² Lewis Lapham, America's Foreign Policy: A Rake's Progress, Harper's, March 1979. Quoted in Studs Terkel, The Good War (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 8.

³ John Northrop, executive director, Alabama School of the Fine Arts, Birmingham, AL, ASFA Applause Newsletter, Nov. 2007, 2.

1

Reds

Not a single major account of post-World War II American life and culture omits discussion of the Red Scare—as the phenomenon, alleged to have become a major preoccupation of many citizens during the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s, is now familiarly termed. Accordingly, chroniclers of the era attempt often to depict a great atmospherics of fear permeating the culture from top to bottom, within and without, and everywhere in between. This supports a certain strain of ideological argument, but thematically it never quite comes off. The effect is something vaguely humorous—like the panicked crowds of a city fleeing from space aliens or a movie monster, or of kids going fitfully to sleep at night while worrying about evil creatures under the bed. I suspect that, like me, many who came of age at the time read historical studies of it with a recurrent sense of disjunction between political accounts of the era and the recollection of how particular political moments—frequently spotlighted as nodes of scandal or crisis—were really experienced by most Americans.

For a young person such as myself growing up in post-1945 America, the Reds were certainly represented as the enemy, and in substantial degree, we were encouraged to believe, the enemy was everywhere. Most visibly, the Reds were the Russians, or, more properly, the Soviets, bent on communist world domination. Forget about the brave World War II ally, fighting for Mother Russia against the Nazis in the great patriotic war; about Stalin, the Big Three partner, along with Roosevelt and Churchill, the little father of the Russians, Uncle Joe. The Soviets became the relentless expansionists of the Communist bloc, the ruthless masters of the Iron Curtain countries, with their puppet governments. By 1949 they had the atomic bomb; as things quickly turned out, they had gained important parts of the technology through a system of spies within the United States capable of infiltrating the most secret of projects and security systems.

After 1949 the Reds also included the Communist Chinese, the new masters, under Mao Tse-tung, of the great Asian mainland; concurrently, they also extended their reach into Korea and Indochina, with the first, a communist dictatorship under Kim Il-sung, openly attacking southward in 1950 and precipitating a three-year war against U.S.-led U.N. forces; and the second, a revolutionary regime under Ho Chi Minh, waging a successful guerilla conflict against the French and eventually the United States. A notable feature of the two anticommunist, hot wars Americans would actually fight, both in the latter precincts of Asia, would be that primary communist sponsorship could never be determined as predominantly Russian or Chinese.

On the world landscape, and in American minds, such sudden postwar reconfigurings of friend versus enemy required a certain hasty, parallel logic of geopolitical substitution. The Nazis and the Japanese were still back there in memory, to be sure, but their imperialist designs and heinous deeds were quickly fading from real-life history—good enough still for villains in war movies, comic books, and other popular-culture celebrations of Allied heroism but no longer part of the official calculus. From 1945 on, as a strategic bulwark in Europe, we needed the Germans almost immediately. Documentation of the death camps was downplayed. Some small mention of state terror against civilians was rendered at the Nuremberg Trials, but the focus of the tribunal was on war crimes in the military sense. As symbolic figures, Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and, eventually, Goering did the Allies the favor of committing suicide; by 1947 second-line members of the Nazi hierarchy were nearly all imprisoned or executed. West Germany and, to a similar degree, free Austria, both demilitarized and democratized under Allied occupation, became key strategic pieces in the puzzle of Western defense against the Soviets, interchangeably known as Russia and the Iron Curtain countries or the Communist bloc. They were also proclaimed as exemplary new free world European nations, showpiece Western-style democracies and capitalist market economies. As against the menace in Europe and the Mediterranean of thriving Communist parties in the political mix of France, Italy, and Greece, the Germans in particular were quickly rehabilitated in the American mind into a nation of the defeated and misled, suffering, bombed-out veterans and their families, starving and dispossessed, propagandized and lied to, who had been ignorant of the enormity of the Nazis' crimes. Repenting of their militarism, West Germans became freedom loving, fervently democratic, committed to full citizenship in the community of